New Delhi: Zohran Mamdani created history Wednesday in more ways than one. He won the New York City’s electoral race with a record margin, and is set to become the first South Asian Muslim mayor in US history. But in what was perhaps most historic for South Asians, he quoted Jawaharlal Nehru in his victory speech and ended it with ‘Dhoom Machale’, the title track from the Bollywood movie ‘Dhoom’.
In an emotional address—alongside his mother and filmmaker Mira Nair, father and academician Mahmood Mamdani, and his wife, illustrator Rama Duwaji—he blended populist rhetoric with political agenda, and framed his victory as a reclamation of power by the city’s working class as he challenged US President Donald Trump.
Addressing New Yorkers as his ‘friends’, the Indian-origin socialist Democrat said, “We have toppled a political dynasty”.
Citing Nehru’s words from his 1947 ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech about “stepping from the old to the new”, the 34-year-old declared that New York had entered “a new era”. The mayor-elect said, “If any place can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him,” he said, “it is the city that gave rise to him.”
Then, addressing the president directly, Mamdani said: “So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you—turn the volume up.”
He then outlined an ambitious policy agenda—freezing rents for two million tenants, making buses free, expanding universal childcare, hiring thousands of new teachers, and creating a “Department of Community Safety” to address mental health and homelessness.
“Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception. In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another. At this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light”, he added.
“The future,” he then declared, “is in our hands.”
A mayor for the marginalised
Throughout his speech, Mamdani returned to the people that he said had built his campaign from the ground up: delivery workers, small business owners, and immigrant families. “For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands,” he said.
“Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor. Palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars. Knuckles scarred with kitchen burns. These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it.”
He dedicated his win to “every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point”, promising that “this city is your city, and this democracy is yours too”.
“Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city who made this movement their own,” he said. “I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican Abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers and nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.”
Mamdani recalled meeting workers like Wesley, a hospital organizer who commutes two hours each way from Pennsylvania because rent is too high in the city, and Richard, a taxi driver with whom Mamdani once joined a 15-day hunger strike. “My brother,” he said, “we are in City Hall now.”
Closing his address, Mamdani reflected on what his election symbolised. “I am young, I am Muslim, I am a democratic socialist and most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this,” he said.
“Hope is alive. Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift, despite attack ad after attack ad. While we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. hope over tyranny, hope over big money and small ideas, hope over despair.”
“New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this. To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us”, he concluded as he walked off to ‘Dhoom Machale’.
(Edited by Shashank Kishan)
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